Slipmat growing pains

[uninen]

As many of you are aware, Slipmat has had a fairly large growth during past few months due to our new streaming server (which is now in public use for everyone and named Frankie) and faster development cycle. Problem is, the number of active community members helping out with DJ onboarding and other support has not been growing at all.

I’m getting flooded here on Slipmat but also on other social media from people asking for private support they should be asking here on Backstage instead. This is very time consuming and causes me a fair bit of unnecessary anxiety.

We also have a growing number of frustrated new DJs because something on the site isn’t working or – more often – they did not take the time to read the instructions and don’t understand the concept of beta. I’ve tried to underline the fact that we’re still in private beta and evolving fast, and you just cannot assume that everything would work perfectly all the time. This alone would not be a problem if we would have even a couple of persons here on Backstage to explain the situation or post a link to the documentation, but as we don’t have those volunteers, this is a problem.

So, in order to avoid me burning out, we’re tightening down the invitations of new DJs to minimum until a couple of things happen:

1. there are more people answering questions and generally discussing and helping out here on Backstage
2. we get a better process for onboarding new DJs which involves having a named tutor who you can ask help from

until above requirements come true, only DJs who have a recommendation from an experienced Slipmat DJ are invited in. (I’ll add this requirement to the docs and explain it there.)

Obviously, everyone can create a listener profile.

How can I help?

Glad you asked! Firstly, everyone can help. No matter how much or little you know, if you know how to use Backstage, you can help.

Spend time on Backstage and on community chat

This is the most obvious thing. If you take 5 minutes away from your daily time on the toxic platforms like Facebook and connect with people here instead, you will literally make the world a better place and at the same time you’ll help our community to grow.

Answer questions

Slipmat does not have a paid staff for doing support work. We need to help each other. You don’t need to know everything, even the simplest things can help:

• search the question from Backstage
• post a simple link
• if needed, ask for more details (see how to report bugs – we need those details)

Note: if you don’t know, preface your answers with “I don’t know, but”. This is really important. Don’t spread misinformation. (Linking to old posts or asking questions is helping, that’s totally different.)

Help out new DJs

Slipmat has tons of features. Experienced DJs know how to use them even though may of them are uncodumented. Please share your knowledge!

What’s next

I’m very excited about some of the bigger upcoming features and one last big change that will help us launch the public beta. There is no timetable for this development, it’s done when it’s done. The more the community can help me and others, the faster we’ll get there. So in the end, all depends on you

I’m personally going to take a break from Backstage for a moment as I feel that burning out with random rants and questions that have been answered tens of times isn’t really smart. If the community can help me, that’s great, if not, then we’re not there yet

The next beta release should be ready in about 2-3 weeks, going to focus on that now!

[DrBones]

Keep up the good work it is appreciated, will try and help out as far as I can.

[Stchris88]

I’m guessing your getting hit hard with the new people coming from chew? I am one of them. Are you running this whole site by yourself? If you are i can understand your frustration. but you do know how easy chew was to navigate through. People here do want to help but most really don’t know how. We don’t have access or the knowledge to change anything technically in the site. that makes it harder on you since your the only one. I experienced this on a site in the early 2000’s when i streamed live on winamp. The site owner did everything himself and got angry at the dj s for not contributing. But there was really nothing we could do but make suggestions since nobody knew website development and he wouldn’t authorize anyone to make changes. This led to basically everyone getting kicked from the site. All I’m saying is that if it’s all on your shoulders, you’ve got to understand where some new users are coming from and at the same time, don’t burn yourself out on it. People want to deejay here but can’t do much else. Decide what you want your site to be and stick with it. It should be fun, not causing anxiety.

[oxyRTRD]

Remember @uninen that no one has not forced you to run this project alone. I understand that these few months has been crazy, but now when everything works quite nicely, how about if you just breath awhile?

Then to your wishes:

1. I can and I will answer more questions in future, I can promise this.
2. I cannot be anyones tutor because of my own job is burning me up. After 20 hours problem solving I don’t have energy to help someone forward.

And just a tip for a new DJs in here. Please use search function and try to use it few more times again before you start a new topic. Also just try to do things differently, you will not break this site if you are doing some extra clicks with your mouse.

[michaelabsher]

I’ve had the opportunity to answer questions for a couple new DJ’s in the chat while they checked out my show. Not a bad way to do things as it helps everyone involved! I got some involved listeners and was able to help out some new spinners.